lightreads | Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An extended discussion of the factors that influence the development of human societies by way of answering the question of why certain societies – Europe – have socially and technologically dominated. And specifically by way of explaining Europe's dominance as an accident of environment – species availability, geography, that sort of thing – rather than anything inherent to its peoples or, just as often, anything inherently inferior about the native populations of the rest of the globe.

Hmm. An ambitious project, and I'm glad I read it, but.

But this is one of those books where I'm reading, I'm interested, we're good. And then I start getting a feeling, just a niggle, like there's something I'm not seeing. And then it slowly dawns on me and I go, ". . . wait . . . wait, no. Really?"

What I wasn't seeing here were proper citations. I assumed at first this was an artifact of the audiobook, since they maddeningly cut non-substantive footnotes. (I usually get an e-text to check later, if I am curious. Which I'm me, so I generally am.) But when I checked here, nope, almost nothing.

But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was that when I paid close attention to what he said textually about his sources . . . holy shitballs, guys. Are you fucking kidding me? This dude wrote a book discussing clashes between more advanced societies and less advanced societies, drawing largely from primary sources embedded in the victorious society, and it never occurred to him that this was a problem. Wow.

And separately, I am totally into these projects that promote social justice agendas orthogonally, like arguing against racism by talking about the impact of continental geography on technological development. But I'm always happier when it's clear the author can engage with the meat of the issue if he wants to. And Diamond is, um, still in racism 101. Like, he's against it, everybody! Racism bad! But let's all pause to romanticize indigenous tribal people and talk about how the simplicity of their lives makes them happier than white people. Ug.

So short version: a really interesting project, but Diamond lost a huge amount of credibility with me from start to finish.

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